


Childer

by ushauz



Category: Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: A Small Dash of Humor, Body Horror, Darkspawn, Gen, Medical Grossness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 09:52:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17785184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ushauz/pseuds/ushauz
Summary: In which the Awakening crew gets a first hand experience in how the reproductive process works for these new darkspawn.





	Childer

The last thing Anders ever wanted to do was to travel hip-deep through a haunted marsh, and yet here he was, trailing behind the Warden-Commander as they went looking for a missing Warden.

And why was he in this group? Because somehow he was a Warden now which was apparently an eventual death sentence but hey, at least he wasn’t in the Circle anymore, and even if someone didn’t like him and went ‘oh bluh bluh it’s against the rules but when has that ever stopped us before’, he was fairly certain Surana would back him. They backed him before, back in the Keep after all, and that seemed a bit different from what he dimly recalled of Surana back in the Circle. Granted they hadn’t interacted much, but there had been a few changes.

Like the fact that Surana wore armor now and fought with a sword and sometimes lapsed into elvhen. Anders tactfully didn’t ask how they learned an entire language in a year or so because Surana sure couldn’t speak elvhen back in the Circle Tower, and Anders knew that as a fact as Surana had kept trying to find books on learning the elvhen language.

Meanwhile on the list of other things Anders didn’t know until he joined the Wardens was that werewolves— _werewolves!_ —unholy abominations of wolf and Rage, could catch the Blight. Anders would have died happy never knowing that.

“I told you this wasn’t an escape,” Surana said dryly. “Now you too get to learn all the fun things the civilians are happier off not knowing.”

Surana liked that word now, ‘civilians’. They used it an awful lot, normally on how civilians had no idea how lucky they were. Anders wasn’t sure what horrors they’d seen since the Circle Tower, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to ask what a ‘Harvester’ was.

“Broodmothers,” Oghren said, looking distant.

“I already don’t want to know what that is,” Nathaniel said, currently caught between that look of ‘I want to murder you’ and ‘oh hey I’m enjoying this heroism shit because I’m a crazy person’.

Anders wasn’t sure if he was going to run from the Wardens or not. Sure that would be ‘desertion’ and a ‘serious crime possibly resulting in his death’, but then at this point so was running from the Circles, and that never stopped him. He’d stick it out longer for Surana though. Maybe.

After more Blighted werewolves and then normal undead and a few demons, they ended up pausing as Surana stared at these weird fleshy pod things.

“These shouldn’t be here,” Surana said, gingerly poking at one with a sword. “I can’t sense a presence large enough to be a broodmother anywhere nearby, so these shouldn’t be here. Also these seem different.”

“Probably because a Broodmother isn’t attached,” Oghren said. “Which is- is that good news or bad news?”

“I’m not sure,” they said with a frown. “I’m thinking bad though. I’m hoping Kristoff will know why these are here.”

Anders honestly thought that Blighted werewolves would be the worst thing he’d have to fight in the Blackmarsh, and a reasonable person would agree. All of the horror of a massive fanged monstrosity trying to eat you now with rotting flesh and a peeling face and even more teeth than a normal werewolf would have.

There was an awful chittering noise, and a weird sense of upward static in various corners of his brain. And then one of the pods exploded, and then another did, and trying to eat Surana’s thankfully armored leg was a giant, fat isopod type creature with a face. Not a humanlike face, Anders wouldn’t go that far because there were far more eyes and mandibles than humans normally had, but definitive faces. And then they began to rain down from the blighted trees. One of them fell on Anders, and he collapsed under the weight, feeling like something just punched him in the chest. It tried to scuttle forward, sharp legs tearing at him, and he threw it back at another approaching one with a mind blast and somehow did not set everything on fire like what normally happened when he panicked.

“Ice!” called Surana, and Anders obeyed without question.

He froze as many as he could, and the others focused on smashing their heads in. It turned out to be surprisingly easy when they didn’t have the upper hand of suddenly fat bug darkspawn falling from the skies.

“Hey Commander? Hey Commander, I was told there were only four types of darkspawn?” Anders said, still feeling out of breath. He winced. That grub thing had had sharp legs that had torn his skin. “Like sure there are Blighted animals and ghouls and apparently Blighted werewolves, but there are exactly four types of darkspawn. One for each race. There isn’t some sentient isopod race living at the bottom of the ocean that the Wardens haven’t told anyone about, right?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Surana said, still frowning, and that was not comforting. They were still looking at the fleshpods. “In theory, you need a non-darkspawn race to make darkspawn from. Broodmothers.”

“What if they figured out how to do that with animals,” Oghren said.

“They shouldn’t.”

“Well they shouldn’t talk either, but that’s not stopping them these days, now is it?” Oghren yelled.

Surana sighed. “It’s a bad day when you are sounding sensible.”

Oghren grunted.

Anders slowly healed his lacerations and looked over at everyone else who seemed fine and waved him off. So he was the only idiot to get ambushed then. Well. That did wonders for his ego.

“From now on we also watch the trees,” Surana said, and then they were pressing onward.

They traversed more slowly, which Anders found himself agreeing with. He thought he was used to long bouts of walking but apparently not. Or maybe he had been, but not being able to move around for a year permanently atrophied his leg muscles. That’s probably it. Blame everything on solitary. Like being rude. He couldn’t remember how not to be rude. Not exactly like he was the pinnacle of tact before, but he could have sworn it was easier to not be a heinous dickbag.

He used to be a people person, dammit.

Surana wanted to clear out the marsh of every last darkspawn just in case, and Anders supposed that was their job but really. Why did it have to involve so much walking? As Surana and Oghren confirmed the kills on the latest batch, Anders found himself leaning against a tree, wincing as he poked at his stomach. He shouldn’t be this tender, right?

“Anders!” Surana called, and Anders jolted. Maybe he tore something when the monstrosity fell on him. He sent a smaller but stronger trickle of healing to that area, and that seemed to help.

“Coming, Commander,” Anders said, and Surana rolled their eyes.

—

At first, Surana assumed it was Anders not used to the amount of walking and fighting. It was soul-draining, and they were all tired. At least, Surana remembered it being soul-draining once, before they shoved a ghost into their head for magical knowledge, exactly what all the instructors at the Circle had told them not to do. And then Surana learned how to permanently shift a few things, tie one trait into another. Magic was strength, so let it be their strength.

But before all that, Surana was ill-adapted to the demands of constant travel, even in their early Warden days when unnatural vigor had spread through their body. So surely the same could be said for Anders as well. Surana kept assuming this up until Anders started swaying, steadied himself against a tree, and then promptly vomited into the bushes. And then kept vomiting.

“Woah hey,” Nathaniel said. “You doing alright?”

Nathaniel pressed a hand to Anders’ forehead briefly before Anders slapped it away.

“Fever?” Surana asked, and then inwardly winced when Nathaniel nodded. Surana wasn’t a healer. They drained and twisted and choked, but they had no idea how to do that in reverse.

“Might be all the swamp water,” Anders said dryly. “Hey I don’t feel so good. Like. At all.”

It didn’t matter if Surana wanted to press on just a bit further to find Kristoff; Anders was compromised and a liability in combat. “It’s time to turn back,” they said.

Anders briefly touched his stomach before wincing and swearing.

“Can you tell what’s wrong?” Surana asked.

“I’m not feeling well,” Anders said. “I’m not sure how it works for you Commander, but it’s a lot harder to focus when I’m in pain?”

“You can’t get a wisp to aid you?”

“I don’t want to risk accidentally losing control of the wisp inside of me,” Anders said. “Thank you but I will not be possessed. And if I am, I am getting possessed in style. No measly wisp or minor spirit will do it for me, thanks. Only the best, most grandiose of all demons will get to wear my attractive body as a fleshsuit.”

“Of course,” Surana said fondly, patting him on the shoulder. “I refuse to consider anyone other than Pride myself.”

“See, you get it,” Anders said.

—

At first it was a slower walk back. And then Anders slowed even more, face in a permanent grimace of pain, and occasionally vomiting again. It was getting to the point where Anders was only vomiting thin, greenish liquid and spittle, nothing else. And then he didn’t get back up, sitting now with his knees pulled up to his chest.

“Anders we can’t stop in the middle of the swamp,” Nathaniel said. “It isn’t safe.”

Anders simply shook his head.

“I’ll carry you then,” Surana said.

“A small green bean,” Anders said coherently.

“A magically strengthened bean,” Surana corrected. “But first I want to look at your body.”

“You could have just asked,” Anders said in a half-slur, waggling his eyebrows.

Surana was too worried to blush at this point despite any past fantasies that may or may not have happened about a master escape artist teaching a younger escape artist-to-be, and when Anders slowly unstrapped his armor, hissing and wincing and fumbling, their eyes widened.

“Well that doesn’t look good,” Oghren said.

Anders’ abdomen was horribly discolored like a dark bruise.

“Oh hey,” Anders said coherently. “Wow that looks bad. I need a healer.” Anders then poked his stomach and hissed. “Well that’s a bad sign,” he continued. “It shouldn’t be this firm to the touch, and no you don’t get to touch. Hurts.”

“If you were hurting this bad, you should have said something,” Surana said.

“Thought my leggies were all fucked up from Circle-time. You know,” Anders said, shivering. Surana gently touched Anders’ shoulder, and he was far too warm.

The injury made no sense. The darkspawn hadn’t hit him hard enough to warrant such bruising, unless something inside had torn just right?

“I know you are concerned about losing control of the wisp, but that’s magic I can’t do,” Surana said. “And this definitely seems like something has gone terribly wrong. Internal bleeding?”

“Probably? Why all the vomit though,” Anders slurred before finally, shakily, summoning a wisp. The wisp danced around Anders briefly before gently touching Anders’ chest.

“Ohhhhh shit. Oh shit oh fuck me,” Anders said.

“What?”

“Hey Surana? Hey. No wait you haven’t seen these darkspawn before so you wouldn’t know, but is it possible for darkspawn to lay eggs?” Anders asked. “Because there’s eggs in me.”

Oghren’s face blanched. “What kind of asshole friend would try to convince me to get sober in a world where darkspawn figure out how to lay eggs in people? I’m getting drunk when we get back.”

“Okay. Okay eggs. Well.” Surana breathed out, trying to steady themself. They were the leader and couldn’t freak out because Anders had eggs inside of him. Darkspawn eggs. Surana could also freak out about the ramifications of darkspawn laying eggs later as well. “We are in a swamp. Swamps are bad for surgery. Anders will just get infected and die anyway, right?”

Anders poked Surana’s shoulder. “Yup! The winner is you.”

“We don’t know how long until the eggs hatch, so first let’s try getting Anders out of the swamp and then perform surgery,” Surana said.

—

Surana was thankful that they were able to get Anders to look at himself earlier, because as time passed, he got less and less coherent, and his stomach began to ooze a pus so foul-smelling it made Surana gag, and that was saying something since they had spent time in the corruption in the Deep Roads.

It smelled like death, and that worried Surana more than the eggs.

And then Surana began to see Anders’ stomach move, causing ripples of pus to ooze out as well, and Anders began to scramble at Surana’s breastplate. Just as they put him down, he vomited again, and this time there was blood.

They had hatched then.

The smell was now worse than death, worse than rotting corpses, and Anders was crying and moaning.

“Commander we don’t have time to leave the swamp,” Nathaniel said desperately. “You’re a mage. Surely there must be something you can do?”

A more skilled entropy mage might be able to target the squirming larva inside of Anders. Surana never could do small, subtle, _useful._ They could only throw forces of magic around, useful for war and killing and nothing else.

No. There was no time to wallow. Think.

Surana gathered sleep in their hands, far more sleep than was needed, and cast it as a blanket on and over and into Anders, concentrating on Anders’ stomach and hopefully, temporarily, quelling whatever had hatched in Anders’ stomach. As well as Anders. No one needed to be awake for surgery.

They dragged Anders to a relatively clean spot and poured water from their waterskin into three pots (one for sterilization, one for washing up, and one for washing off Anders), before using magic to boil the water. Qunari ideas of medicine, but Sten had worked a kind of magic all on his own (while grumbling in Qunlat about primitive cultures).

Surana had tolerated Sten for a while, but after the Circle, they split ways. Perhaps Surana had been hasty, but the things he said as they were forced to step over the bodies of everyone they had ever known…

Perhaps Surana could have learned from Wynne who had helped for Kinloch Hold at least, but then Surana had to abandon Wynne after having to use blood magic to convince everyone that it was ‘Gray Warden magic’ and not blood magic. Because Surana couldn’t bring themself to kill her and Irving and Greagoir and fucking Cullen, even after she had just _outed_ them, after they had saved what had remained of the tower, but nor did Surana want Wynne around after that.

There wasn’t time to mull on the past right now. The point was, Surana knew some of the workings of the body, but what they did know, or rather knew how to use magic to know, was where every vein and artery was. At the very least, Surana could navigate around those when removing the darkspawn.

Surana had to throw sleep a few more times until the thinnest knife they had (courtesy of Nathaniel) had been properly boiled and then cooled with ice magic. Surana scrubbed in the other pot of now magically cooled water and then got to work.

If they got this wrong, they could kill Anders.

They couldn’t let that distract them.

They gagged through the smell (Sten had repeatedly said that smells didn’t bring sickness on their own, that the Qunari had debunked miasma theory a while ago), and cast one more spell first. Paralysis, which had the side effect of slowing bleeding. This would all be pointless if Anders died of blood loss regardless after all, and then they finally cut into Anders’ flesh. Pus oozed and leaked everywhere, but Surana ignored it, focusing on not hitting the map of major veins and arteries in Anders, and also focusing on where a few anomalies were.

And sure enough, Surana found the first tiny Childer grub the size of their thumb, belly swollen like a bloated tick, and threw it over to Oghren who stomped on it. Even through the bleeding, Surana could note where it had been chewing on Anders’ insides and shuddered.

One down, four more to go.

—

Anders had rather expected that that would be it for him, and yet he woke up regardless feeling strangely light.

He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t move. He frowned at them, and they still didn’t move. He couldn’t quite feel them though. Or his stomach. Or his arms.

Did he still have arms?

The thought, he felt, should have been alarming, but it wasn’t. Instead he got distracted because there was a _ceiling,_ and that was just fascinating.

“Well the good news is you are off of active duty for a while,” a voice came.

The bean!

“You did surgery!” Anders said cheerfully. “I’m so proud. And alive! Also drugged I think?”

“Oh yeah we gave you ether,” Surana said, sitting down in a chair next to him. “We gave you a lot of ether, and you also lost a good deal of blood.”

“You got them all out though? No more little grublings?”

“Well, considering that they were eating you from the inside out, I’m pretty sure we would know if we missed one by now,” Surana said.

“Worst bedside manner. Healer license revoked. I want my money back.” Anders paused. “That’s probably what the fleshpods are. There are wasps that do that you know. Put an egg in a spider, larva eats the spider. It probably would have made a flesh cocoon out of me.” That thought strangely wasn’t distressing either, but then that would be the ether. Ether was always such fun. Karl was the best for ether parties.

“That’s what we think would happen, or rather the surviving grub. One of them had already half-eaten another one when we fished them out. As is, you may want to heal yourself up once the ether wears off, and watch for signs of infection. I tried my best, but you aren’t out of the weeds yet. Infection could kill you easier than the darkspawn.”

“Ether wears off, and I’m going to start yelling because my insides are all messed up,” Anders helpfully informed them.

Surana was looking sad though. “I’m fine,” Anders said. And after a moment of trying to figure out how arms worked, he reassuringly patted their hand with his own.

“Yeah, but they moved awfully fast,” Surana said. “If all those fleshpods were Children… they might not need a Blight to wipe everyone out. Maker knows what would happen if so much as a single Childer got into a populated area.”

Anders frowned. That all seemed bad, but also a bit beyond him right now.

Surana sighed heavily, _tiredly,_ before flashing him a brief smile. “It’s good to see you pulled through though. Heal up when you can; we will need you on your feet. The rest of us will head back to the marsh. I’m starting to doubt we will find Kristoff in any form that isn’t mangled flesh, but I’ve got to try, and just maybe he will have answers.”

Anders gave them a small salute.


End file.
